The views expressed herein may not reflect the views of my employer, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Council of Elrond. Fnord.

rant

First off, the word itself. The Cloud. What is The Cloud? It’s a server that you don’t own. You can’t touch it, it’s in someone else’s data center. It may or may not be virtual. Amazon’s Cloud or Microsoft’s or Google’s are several data centers with racks and racks of servers. They are physical, just not at your location. And they’re accessed across the Internet. This is something that we’ve been doing for 30 years, it’s called a Wide-Area Network, just scaled up bigger. We had bi-coastal WANs before the World Wide Web came along.

So you’re paying for a server that you have no physical relation to. Now, on the one hand, you’re also not responsible if something breaks. You don’t pay the electricity bill for power and cooling or to keep the lights on, or off, as is more common in a lot of data centers. The concept of backups becomes much more worrying for me because I have to trust them utterly that my machine is being backed up, and in the case of the server that I’m working on now, I don’t know when that VM backup happens. I perform my due diligence with my SQL Server backups, but if I don’t know WHEN that VM backup takes place, then I don’t know what my recovery window is. My full backups go off, along with the rest of my maintenance, at about 23:50. If they back up the VM at 21:00 and I have to restore from that previous backup, I have to know that the previous DBCCs and index maintenance and whatever didn’t run. Ultimately I’m going to set up a form of log shipping where backups will be compressed, encrypted, and emailed to a repository, but I don’t have that in place right now.

But my big gripe is downtime. We’ve had Microsoft working on our server trying to resolve a problem. Yesterday my boss comes in and tells me to sign off that box so they could reboot it, so I do. Then shortly after he says he can’t connect to it, so he’s wondering if they might have accidentally done a shutdown rather than a restart, so I open up the control panel for the VM. And it’s unresponsive.

The entire data center was offline. Our one server plus who knows how many others, all gone. It was down for a good half an hour.

Let’s relate that to local hardware. If my server crashes, I reboot it, put the database in to administrator mode, run DBCCs to make sure all is well, then I open it up for the users. If there’s a larger outage like a disk failure or the entire box goes up in flame, then we’ve got something that’s going to take longer to address. If a backhoe eats our internet connection, then external users can’t access my system but internal users are fine, and the line will be fixed in a couple of days.

In ALL of these cases, I KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON and I can tell users and management what’s up and give them a SWAG (semi-wild assed guess) as to when normal operations will resume. When a Cloud goes down? No idea. You get an email like this:

We are currently investigating reports of an incident affecting the Network in the WKRP data center. This incident will impact your ability to manage current assets, will impact your ability to generate new assets, and does impact availability of current assets. We are in the process of engaging the appropriate teams to quickly mitigate and resolve this incident and will provide additional information as soon as it is available. …

Isn’t that nice and reassuring?

No, I’m not a fan. EVERY CLOUD PROVIDER HAS OUTAGES. Microsoft has had them, Amazon has had them, Google has had them. Some have had serious security breeches (looking at you, AWS) where it was pretty easy to commandeer someone else’s virtual hosts. Not good.

It’s hard to do security right. We’d like to think that people like AWS has ‘Top People’ doing it, but they make mistakes just like us mere mortals. There’s no easy answers: if you have local servers, you’re going to have problems and outages. If you throw everything in to The Cloud, you’re still going to have problems and outages, and there won’t be a blessed thing that you can do about it.

So which is better? Flip a coin, I don’t know. But for my $0.002, I’d prefer a server that I can touch.